CeeLo Green: 'Heart Blanche' Album is All About "Freedom & Liberty" (Interview)

Maria Sherman

Interview

When you're CeeLo Green and you're about to release your fifth studio album, describing your artistic output comes easily. You have a message, you know how you want to share it. So goes the tale of Green and Fuse: the veteran R&B artist came to our studio to detail his just-released album, Heart Blanche:

My new album Heart Blanche comes out November 13 and I'm really excited about it. 'Heart Blanche' is a clever play on the term 'carte blanche.' That means the freedom to do as one wishes. To think, behave, create as one wishes. The theme on the album for 'Heart Blanche' is pretty much just freedom and liberty and poetic justice. I kind of did this album pretty privately and pretty intimately. It wasn't really about other namesakes or associations. It was about the intimacy and the personal plight of artistic expression.

Green also tells us he took the cover art very seriously. At time, this feels like a lost art. For CeeLo, it's necessity:

To explain the art. Originally, set with the art department, we were trying to come up with something that would convey that. We could've done anything. We could've done something completely irrelevant. We need someone or something that stands out in a crowd, something that insists on individuality. I went through a couple public domain photographs for reference's sake. Then they came up with an illustration. Then we ended up doing a live version which you see. It's artist Nick Cave. That is his signature art piece. I take it as living art. I take it as art being a noun, a person, place and thing. Maybe the artist themselves aren't always sure about what it means or why they're compelled to create so I had to figure it out for myself, what it meant to me. Feel free to interpret it as you wish.